A Photographer Captivated by Wax and Fragments From the Past

The title of the show at the Japan Society sounds just a little pretentious: "Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History." But what it describes is a very personal, whimsical exhibition by this well-known Japanese photographer that incorporates his own work with artifacts that he has collected over the years, particularly from East Asia and Japan.

This assemblage of relics is frequently punctuated by his own meditative, large-scale oceanscapes, all alike in that they show only water, sky and the horizon line between them. Hybrids made by Mr. Sugimoto include a small 13th-century container for symbolic bones of the Buddha, in the heavily gilded shape of a hoju, or flaming jewel. Now it is used as a frame for a tiny version of a signature Sugimoto sea photograph.

Of his own work, the photographer has also included a group of elaborately framed small portraits: Henry VIII surrounded by his six queens. The one depicting Henry is actually a photograph of a wax figure modeled after a Holbein portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Mr. Sugimoto sees the grouping as a successful melding of painting, sculpture and photography, the Holy Trinity of contemporary art.

And he has practiced honka-dori, or emulation of the art of esteemed predecessors, reinterpreting by photographic means a pair of 16th-century ink scrolls that display an idealized pine forest.

The photographer's own works, his incursions into others', and objects he has collected but not tweaked make up this maverick miscellany, a result of his long-term interest in the connections between ancient and modern worlds. Organized by the Japan Society with the Smithsonian Institution's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and put together by Mr. Sugimoto (who formerly dealt in Japanese arts and antiquities), the show is now playing in Manhattan before moving on to Washington.

Mr. Sugimoto's reach is long, and his range is broad, from fossil stones to textiles to undersea dioramas to Japanese calligraphy to the New York World's Fair of 1939-40. And some of his presentations are decidedly offbeat.

A large stone rod in the shape of a penis from the Jomon period (10,000-400 B.C.) is enshrined on a hospital gurney. A row of curved magatama beads made from semiprecious stones -- two contemporary, six from Japan's Kofun period (third to sixth centuries) -- is displayed in a medical sterilizer. A silver Art Deco makeup case from Tiffany is fitted inside with a photo of the Sea of Japan and one of a wax likeness of the Japanese emperor Hirohito. (Mr. Sugimoto is apparently a devotee of wax museums.)

The show opens with a display of fossils, "an amazing apparatus for accurately recording the past," Mr. Sugimoto writes. He sees them as the oldest form of art, although created by nature long before "art" began to happen. And some of the fossils do have aesthetic appeal, particularly an elaborate one found in North America that is hundreds of millions of years old (from the Carboniferous period of the Paleozoic era), its surface adorned with a delicate relief of undersea organisms.

But what to make of the dozen glass-topped wooden boxes set in a row nearby, which give, via small-scale photographs, a short and very quirky course in history? Titled "Cause and Effect in Black and White," they begin with a museum diorama of undersea life in the Cambrian period, work up to a group portrait of the British royal family and a portrait of Albert Einstein (both taken in a wax museum), and include the bombing of Hiroshima. The work ends with an idyllic postcard vista titled "Nature of Japan."

What he presents in the show, he says in the catalog, are "mere fragments of history; they are more like parts to an assembly kit that you have to put together for yourself." Yes, indeed.

Moving right along, in the next gallery we find mingling with other works of various periods a grand-scale Sugimoto photograph (1977) of the misting Kegon Waterfall near Tokyo, which goes back to prehistoric times. It supposedly emerged after the eruption of the divine peak, Mount Nantai, the photographer notes, adding that when he stood at the waterfall's foot, he felt he was "witnessing a primeval moment" of its creation.

The rest of the large-scale Sugimoto photographs here are from his well-known series of sea and riverscapes from around the world, meditative, Zenlike vistas of sky and water, made at varying times of day and night.

Seeing his job as a photographer to record for posterity these majestic but increasingly threatened bodies of water, Mr. Sugimoto has traveled around the world to shoot them. Contemplating these quiet images, you get a bone-deep sense of the world's immensity and (however misleadingly) its timelessness.

A perhaps too large textile area of the show presents fragments of Shosoin and Horyuji tapestries from the eighth century, along with a group of hangings, mostly religious in nature. One beauty is the "Kasuga Deer Mandala," from the Muromachi period (15th century), in which a princely white deer represents a Shinto god from the sacred mountain of Kasuga (in the region of Honshu). He is airborne, about to descend on a cloud, and carries a ritual branch and sacred mirror on his saddle, as a very large golden sun and medallions of five Buddhist deities appear behind him.

Several examples of calligraphy, including "Fragment of the Myoe Dream Diary," part of a 40-year record of dreams by the Kegon hermit priest Myoe (1173-1232), add vigor to the medley. A group of six folkish painted wood masks, from the Kamakura period (13th century), the Muromachi period and the Momoyama period (late 16th century), made before the sophisticated masks of the Noh drama came about, charm with their sharp characterizations and rural simplicity. A true treasure is a subtle but lively bronze image of an aged male deity from the 12th-century Heian period, found in an urn buried deep in the mountains near Nara, part of a "time capsule" for transmitting Buddhism to later generations after the religion went into a predicted 10,000-year decline.

So welcome to Mr. Sugimoto's engaging Wunderkammer, as packed with goodies as the princely assemblages of art and curiosities brought together by European nobles in the 16th and 17th centuries. It may not be all that enlightening, but as an artist's personal survey, it seems to work.

"Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History" remains at the Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan, (212)832-1155, through Feb. 19.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section E, Page 33 of the National edition with the headline: ART REVIEW; A Photographer Captivated by Wax and Fragments From the Past. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe